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S o m e t im e ag o a l e a d in g magazine published a con densation of a book that turned out to be an amaz ing hoax. The author related horrible experiences he claimed to have endured under the German occupation of France during the Second World War. He deceived his publishers, he deceived a leading magazine, he de ceived the public. But the worst of it, someone said, was that he deceived himself; he pretended until he came to believe his own story. The old motto, ‘To be rather than to seem,” would have to be reversed to fit this generation. We prefer to seem rather than to be. It is the Age of Seeming. In the last days God will send delusion that men should believe a lie. We are being conditioned, it would appear, for that ultimate delusion. It is a day of make-believe, sham, sleight-of-hand, gobbledygook, trickery, imitation, simu lation, double-talk and ballyhoo. Politicians talk like statesmen and sinners act like saints. In Russia a gen eration brainwashed with lies lives with souls as barren as their faces are blank. The same paralysis of deception is at work over here in other forms. Getting ready for antichrist, men deceive and are being deceived. It gets over into religion. It is possible to pretend spiritual experience until we think it is real. I have read of a man who dreamed that he arrived in a town where almost nobody wore shoes. He came to an im pressive building on a corner and discovered that it was a shoe factory. When he expressed amazement, someone explained: “You don’t understand. We get to- gather here twice a week and sing about shoes and talk about shoes and raise money to send others out to tell about shoes but not many of us wear shoes.” The appli cation of that dream to our modem church life is too close to be comfortable. We gather each week to sing, talk and raise money to export a commodity of which we carry very little in stock. Form of Godliness There is “a form of godliness without the power there of,” a form without force, ritual without reality. Recently I sat in a pulpit and watched the congregation sing. They were singing a hymn loaded with Gospel dynamite. I couldn’t help saying to myself, “ If they knew what they were singing they couldn’t possibly look like that. If the hymn is not true in their lives, it should bring conviction and they should hang their heads in shame. If it is true in their experience they should be shaking the rafters with it.” But of course we are often unconscious when we sing at church, when we read the Scriptures, when we hear the sermon. Presently we get .up and go out the door from one world into another and never the twain do meet. As a church bulletin board recently declared, “Religion is too often not bread for daily use but cake for special occasions.” Phillips put it in one crisp sentence when he declared that Christianity once was an experience but has become a performance. Any man with discernment cannot help being shocked by the frightening unreality of trafficking in unfelt truth. One is reminded of what Gibbon wrote about the Greek scholars of the tenth century: “They held in their lifeless hands the riches of their fathers without inheriting the spirit which had created and im proved that sacred patrimony. They read, they praised, they compiled, but their languid souls seemed alike in capable of thought and action.” What would Gibbon say today about us and the way we handle the coinage of God s truth without knowing whose image and super scription is thereon? Something like this is the sad plight of Ephesus with out first love, Sardis with a reputation to be alive but dead, her works not fulfilled before God. We go through
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